ABSTRACT
Local history, long considered by scholars to be outside the mainstream of historical inquiry and of interest to amateur historians only, established credibility with the rise of social history. Historians studying marginalized groups and unexplored topics, the hallmarks of social history, turned to communities as their research laboratories. In scouring town records and documents to understand the processes of historical change, social historians changed local history: who does it, how it is done, and how it is perceived by the wider historical community. The traditional narrative of local events has been replaced by an analytical interpretation that places local history into a broader context of change. Social historians have illustrated that the genesis of change can be local. Moreover, they have demonstrated the role of human agency in historical change. Local history is a legitimate field of inquiry and no longer the domain of the antiquarian and genealogist alone, although some tensions still exist amid the purposes and methods of local history. The field’s renaissance reveals an interesting conflict and tentative rapprochement between academic and amateur historians in the United States.
